Hacker News: lr4444lr

New comment by lr4444lr in "The happiest I've ever been"

lr4444lr — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 23:29:14 +0000

To quote H.L. Mencken (paraphrasing), a teacher's job is miserable because they must ceaselessly try to get masses or people to think who have no real capacity to.

You might be lucky to reach a small minority of your students, assuming environmental forces of poverty, dysfunctional family, and peer influence don't muzzle their gifts. But the day in day out bulk of your work isn't those "Mr. Holland's Opus" moments: it's handling a bunch of kids who don't want to be there in a bureaucratic set of rules imposed on you from above. And private schools are not immune to these problems either.

New comment by lr4444lr in "The happiest I've ever been"

lr4444lr — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 01:14:03 +0000

As someone who taught kids in person and fell into a deep depression with how Kafkaesque that job was and then found so much more gratification as a SWE, all I can say is, the author's experience is not universal. (And I am a parent, so it's not about disliking kids.) I will say though that remote work is definitely dystopia. I need an office and the presence of people physically.

New comment by lr4444lr in "Layoffs at Block"

lr4444lr — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 04:04:04 +0000

I dislike Jack going back several years, but I think in this instance he's admitting that he's taking responsibility between weighing the risk of doing this vs. not doing this. Maybe morale will tank anyway and the company will hold on, but be out-innovated by competitors that invested in growth. There are future outcomes that could prove he made the wrong call, and I any time layoffs are announced, there is a tacit mea culpa about past over-hiring.

New comment by lr4444lr in "Blood test boosts Alzheimer's diagnosis accuracy to 94.5%, clinical study shows"

lr4444lr — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 15:20:07 +0000

Downsizing your house? Picking your long term care location? Changing your asset balance? Recording more photos, audio, and video?

Knowing an early, painful fate allows you to approach it with dignity.

New comment by lr4444lr in "Blood test boosts Alzheimer's diagnosis accuracy to 94.5%, clinical study shows"

lr4444lr — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 15:17:55 +0000

Okay but even that analogy is limited. Incurable progressive diseases almost invariably have lifestyle factors, supplements, or medications that can at least slow the rate of progression for many people. Those are also often more effective when started during early stage detection. There is literally nothing the average person can do about the asteroid.

New comment by lr4444lr in "$30B for laptops yielded a generation less cognitively capable than parents"

lr4444lr — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 03:38:21 +0000

Stats? Who do you think is buying the kids the phones and the data plans? Who is letting them take them to school in the first place?

The kids would be better off being told to read chapter 7 than play sensory overload edutainment tools that fragment their attention.

New comment by lr4444lr in "My smart sleep mask broadcasts users' brainwaves to an open MQTT broker"

lr4444lr — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 17:00:29 +0000

At this point, I trust LLMs to come up with something more secure than the cheapest engineering firm for hire.

New comment by lr4444lr in "Vitamin D and Omega-3 have a larger effect on depression than antidepressants"

lr4444lr — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 13:47:32 +0000

They've been losing ground to placebo in more recent research.

Plus, most of the more serious side effects take a lot more time to manifest than the typical length any given patient remained in the older clinical trials that secured FDA approval and grounded the official manufacturer literature.

I am glad we have these tools, but I suspect they are vastly overused, and patients not well informed.

New comment by lr4444lr in "Iran Protest Death Toll Could Top 30k, According to Local Health Officials"

lr4444lr — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 14:34:40 +0000

On what basis do you call it "slop"? I would agree that it's not much relevant to HN, but it seems to report that the number is at odds with most other figures.

New comment by lr4444lr in "Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant"

lr4444lr — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 11:32:47 +0000

Were any of the prior fears totally wrong?

New comment by lr4444lr in "I'm addicted to being useful"

lr4444lr — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 04:03:37 +0000

Counterpoint - she should have known what she was getting into marrying an engineer. It cones with the territory.

New comment by lr4444lr in "90M people. 118 hours of silence. One nation erased from the internet"

lr4444lr — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 19:16:22 +0000

"China bad"?

Do you have any idea how much Chinese economic leverage has caused Hollywood to censor against CCCP criticism?

As for Iran, we have a literal embargo, so it's not quite the same.

New comment by lr4444lr in "Indifference is a power (2015)"

lr4444lr — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 15:11:38 +0000

As I get older, I read this entirely differently (as an appeal to empathy) than I did when I was younger (as an appeal to stolidity).

In other words, you should be pained for your neighbor when his slave breaks his cup. Maybe his grandmother left him that cup, and he's developed many fond memories around which he drank a soothing beverage in that heirloom. That empathy how we connect with people, build meaning, and make life richer.

New comment by lr4444lr in "Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes"

lr4444lr — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 20:26:07 +0000

It's debatable - to put it mildly - whether Maduro is the legitimate president of Venezuela.

New comment by lr4444lr in "Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes"

lr4444lr — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 16:30:03 +0000

... and then President Vance maintaining the status quo would bring you back to reality.

New comment by lr4444lr in "Warren Buffett steps down as Berkshire Hathaway CEO after six decades"

lr4444lr — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 17:23:20 +0000

People with a lot less economic knowledge than Buffet still understand that another Depression could easily render them jobless and unable to pay a mortgage on a cheaper house. Wishing for a housing market downturn is not the same as a widescale GDP pullback.

New comment by lr4444lr in "I rebooted my social life"

lr4444lr — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 14:49:07 +0000

Find something you need their help with that forces them out of the house. Depressed people often lack purpose.

New comment by lr4444lr in "Warren Buffett steps down as Berkshire Hathaway CEO after six decades"

lr4444lr — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:22:48 +0000

I respect Buffett greatly on a professional level, and think it's the height of arrogance to believe any one of us personally has the moral right to decide which level of lawful activity becomes turpitudinous greed.

THAT SAID...

My uncle (he's 98) had a passing acquaintance with Buffett during their overlap at Penn, and in the one econ class they shared, he remarked having heard Buffett say in almost salivating eagerness as he rubbed his hands that if only there could be another Great Depression, he would make a killing. The dude has value investing in his DNA beyond anything else, I truly believe. But he's argued for changing complex and unfair taxation, and always been a good citizen as far as I can tell. I think if all of Wall Street were like him, the world would be a much better place.

New comment by lr4444lr in "The future of software development is software developers"

lr4444lr — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 16:28:38 +0000

> After working with agent-LLMs for some years now, I can confirm that they are completely useless for real programming. > They never helped me solve complex problems with low-level libraries. They can not find nontrivial bugs. They don't get the logic of interwoven layers of abstractions.

This was how I felt until about 18 months ago.

Can you give a single, precise example where modern day LLMs fail as woefully as you describe?

New comment by lr4444lr in "Weight loss jabs: What happens when you stop taking them"

lr4444lr — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 15:10:23 +0000

People also are often unaware that the symptoms of asthma which cause the most concern (dyspnea, tightness, etc.) are less hypoxia and more hypercapnia. Hypoxia in normal people does not feel like breathlessness: it's lightheadedness, low energy, turning blue, etc. Asthma is almost definitionally airway hyper-responsiveness (and relevant structural changes): any fitness intervention that can help improve CO2 expulsion will probably greatly help an asthmatic seek relief. This is also why in acute attacks, pursed lip exhalations can really help.